Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea

Abstract

Imperatives of Care adds an important facet to our understanding of “Korea’s medical modernization,” first during the Great Han Empire (Taehan cheguk, 1897–1910) and later under Japanese colonial rule (1910–45), by centering on gender politics (3). Narratives about the development of modern medicine in Korea commonly take a supposedly gender-neutral perspective that in fact prioritizes the achievements of male medical professionals and renders women’s contributions to and experiences with health care practices secondary, if not entirely invisible. By bringing the untold side of the story to the fore, Kim invites readers to view the contested beginnings of modern medicine in Korea through the lens of women’s physical, intellectual, and emotional labors. The shift of focus, in turn, helps us understand the various social and cultural ramifications that new curative and health care practices had in different corners of the nation, beyond official medical institutions, during the first half of the twentieth century. This book is concerned with not only how a small number of women became medical professionals through the narrow paths of education and employment opportunities but also how the modern transformation of health care impacted a broad range of Korean women and how we should remember and appreciate their unnoticed and undercompensated care work.Kim begins her book with women’s education at the turn of the twentieth century. The first chapter, “Sanitizing Women and Domestic Science,” traces the shifting emphasis in the education of women from the instilling of “womanly virtues” (pudŏk) to the raising of future mothers and household managers who would provide scientifically tested care for their families. Korean reformers perceived the state, local communities, families, and individuals as a symbiotic whole that shared the responsibility of strengthening the nation. They believed that, to build a strong nation, women should know how to sanitize their house and keep their family healthy based on scientific knowledge. As a result, “domestic science” (kajŏnghak) became a significant part of girls’ school curriculum. As have other feminist historians, Kim notes the contradictory nature of women’s education during this period: modern schooling served to bring women back into the domestic space, where women of the upper class had been traditionally confined. And yet, she insightfully concludes that the education of “domestic science” not only encouraged women to gain literacy in health care but ultimately paved the way for “the professionalization of women’s medical work” (50).The following two chapters call attention to three medical professions that became open to women during the colonial period: physicians, nurses, and midwives. According to Kim, calls to train female personnel in medicine were made on the premise that women’s primary contributions to the nation should be through their roles as mothers and caregivers for the family, an idea that was commonly embraced by the Government General of Korea (GGK), missionaries, and Korean women themselves. In chapter 2, “From the Ŭinyŏ to the Yŏŭi,” Kim relates how a small percentage of Korean women found ways to become physicians when there was no legally recognized medical school for women until 1938, twenty-four years after “a license to practice medicine as a physician” was initially granted to Korean men who graduated from the GGK Hospital Training Institute (61). Established and run by the GGK, accredited medical schools in Korea primarily aimed to train Japanese physicians for the settler population. They provided some limited opportunities for Korean men to become medical doctors but almost none for Korean women. Women who did become qualified physicians—by completing medical school abroad either through their missionary connections or with family support, or in rare cases by taking classes in all-male medical schools as auditors—were expected and chose to specialize only in gynecology or pediatrics. As discussed in chapter 3, “The Heavenly Task of Nursing,” two medical professions, nursing and midwifery, became accessible to a limited degree to Korean women during the colonial period through training programs or schools for Japanese settlers either run or approved by the GGK. Kim points out that it was foreign missionaries who first offered Korean women formal nursing training through mission hospitals as early as 1903. Their influence, however, weakened by the late 1920s due to the GGK’s strict licensing regulations, Korean nurses’ strikes over their poor working conditions at mission hospitals, and shrinking support from mission boards. Missionaries then shifted their focus to women’s and infant health clinics and education programs, giving Korean medical workers leadership opportunities and ultimately laying the foundation for social and medical welfare systems in the post-1945 period.The last main chapter, “Negotiating Gynecology,” examines gender politics in medicine by exploring various accounts of puinbyŏng (women’s disease), an early twentieth-century neologism that refers to a wide range of symptoms related to women’s reproductive organs. Kim’s narrative places the discourse of this illness at the juncture of various competing and overlapping forces: gynecological explanations, Sino-Korean medical practitioners’ traditional paradigms, the growing pharmaceutical industry, the patriarchal attempt to define womanhood through child-bearing ability, medical missionaries’ partially overblown criticism of Korean women for their lack of scientific understanding of health care, and women’s practical approaches to relief and cures. In the latter part of the chapter, Kim pairs the debates about puinbyŏng with those over birth control, stressing how both discussions, on the one hand, served to construct the view of the female body and womanhood through reproductive function and, on the other, helped women increase their skills in self-care.Arising from the chapters of this book is the idea that Korean women’s initial relationships with modern medicine were mediated by the belief that women’s worth should be measured by their reproductive function and their roles as caregivers. This might sound familiar to some readers of Korean and gender studies. However, the stories the author tells are densely packed with new insights and findings. In fact, one of the most important contributions of this book, I would argue, is to challenge our clichéd approach to the notion of “wise mother and good wife.” Based on her solid archival research and thoughtful engagement with secondary sources, Kim demonstrates that while many educated women once again found themselves ensnared in the patriarchal gender division, some of them utilized the male-centered social expectation to claim ownership of medical knowledge, health care, and their own bodies and even to justify their pursuits of careers in the field of medicine. To put it another way, they reinterpreted the patriarchal gender script for women as the self-enabling idea that learning medical care is “more imperative for women than men” (76)—hence the title of the book. As Kim presents her original claims somewhat modestly at times, Imperatives of Care demands a careful and reflective reading. However, it will undoubtedly provide an intellectually gratifying experience for those who do. This book will be of great interest to scholars of the history of medicine and science in East Asia, modern Korean history, and gender studies.